This morning, users of the Amazon App Store were wished a “Happy Halloween” in the form of a message indicating that they’d been signed out of their Amazon App Store account, and that they should sign back in. Efforts to do so, however, would be met with the message, “There was a temporary error signing you in. Please try again in a few moments.”
To make matters worse, these users might have run into further frustration when accessing certain applications (Trillian and GasBuddy, to name a couple) that utilize Amazon’s proprietary DRM token. This mechanism, designed to enable the “Buy once, read (install) anywhere” accessibility that Kindle books are known for, also limits access to the applications to devices where the purchaser’s Amazon account is persistently signed in. (So no “sharing” of apps!) Use of this device is optional, and up to the individual developer / company, for better or worse.
This morning, apps obtained via the Amazon App Store utilizing the token system, even if already running, required re-authentication with your Amazon credentials. Unfortunately, that authentication was not obtainable, thus effectively locking you out of your potentially paid application.
While the Amazon App Store accessibility issue only seemed to last a few minutes, the application access issue endured for well over an hour.
At this time, full functionality appears to be restored, though the cause of the outage, its effects, or steps Amazon may undertake to prevent its re-occurrence or make restitution to affected users are yet unknown.
